You have confused ideas with property.

And you are confused to think all intellectual property is ideas, whereas the reality is things like songs are based upon ideas, but are not ideas themselves. Songs are air vibrations created by instruments or human voices and ideas are ueed to guide these vibrations -- so songs are not ideas. Songs are tangible (to the ear) whereas ideas are abstract.

Just as a house can be based upon ideas (such as ideas about location, ideas about exterior design, ideas about interior design etc), the house is not ideas, rather it uses ideas just as songs use ideas.

The only rational argument for using state force to punish people or make them pay for making a copy of a work is that doing so promotes the creation of more works.

When you derive benefit from a commercial product, such as a song, without payment, that is theft, pure and simple. Your argument that the owner is not deprived of his copy is irrelevant. The music was created to be listened to by consumers in exchange for payment.

if I sing one of his songs it doesn't -- and so your comparison makes no sense.

I'm sure if enough people hear it, it does make a difference. You're using somebody else's hard work for your own gain (whether monetary or not) and it dilutes the value of that work even if you give it away for free. This results in lower sales of said song.

I'm not going to repeat the whole thing again (comes up in every copyright related /. thread)...
Govt. spends resources to maintain infrastructure for your property. That's the main reason for the property tax. Where's the need for such (very expensive) infrastructure for a bunch of files sitting on a server?

While IP and real estate are similar, they are not exactly the same. The seller of copyrighted works already pays a cut of his sales as income tax (and sometimes sales tax as well), just as a homeowner pays a small cut of his home value as property tax. Do you want copyright holders to pay double/triple taxes? That's bullshit.

This is abused by labels which you have to give your whole copyright rights to. It either has some value, or its completely worthless.

I imagine some/many artists get screwed by the labels by giving up their copyrights. But at least some retain copyright of their work. In other cases, it's not abuse but just transfer of risk from artist to publisher. If your work is probably going to make between $10,000 and $1,000,000, wouldn't you rather sell it for $250,000 and let the publisher deal with the risk? At least conventional medium artists get copyrights, whereas almost all software devs handover copyright of their works to their employers.

Also, which incentive does it create for content creators to extend periods of existing works?

No matter how much money they make, they still want more. How many financially successful businessmen and artists quit their profession after making a ton of money? Not many. They enjoy their work and they enjoy making money.

Its hard to copy a piece of land, and now have two of it.

While you can't copy it, you can simulate a copy by building multistory buildings like highrises and skyscrapers.

Also, the law wasn't written for descendants to live off ideas of their anchestors.

Who cares? The copyrighted content is a commercial asset and usually descendents benefit from them. There is no need to write a special law about obvious things.

There is no other media in which advertising can uniquely identify me, record that I've seen the ad, and correlate that with other information about me. And I'm not allowing some website to do it to me.

Have you thought about disabling 3rd party cookies (such as cookies from ad networks) in your browser? If your IP address were to change, and since you have disabled ad cookies, there is no way the ad network can obtain an accurate browsing profile.

Oh noes, teh poor website can't show me teh ads. Not my fucking problem. Especially when those ads are being served by entities which collectively are slimy players who consider information about me to be a commodity.

What about the good chunk of websites that care for their users? You wanna stick it them too?

Real estate isn't something that's created by humans. Its part of our planet

So you're arguing that humans should have more ownership rights over something they did not create, land, and less ownership rights over something they did create, copyrighted content? Hmmm.

The creators themselves won't bother whether the copyright becomes public domain 50 years or 70 years after their death.

I'm sure the copyright content creator and his descendents disagree.

I wouldn't want to pay indefinite royalties to the construction company/architect for a cookie cutter house design. Would you ?

You would not be charged indefinitely for the house design in the same way you don't get charged indefinitely for possessing a music album -- i.e., you only pay once in both cases for purchasing copyrighted content. Indefinite payment comes from the middleman (the construction company or the music distributor/retailer), and not the end user.

So if house designs were copyrighted, the construction company would pay a royalty to the copyright owner (say the architect) for each cookie cutter copy of that house design it constructed. The house owner does not have to pay the architect or the construction company after his initial purchase price (just as you only pay once for that copyrighted 99 cent song) and he can modify it however he wants.

I even walk away from the TV during commercials, because I don't care.

Walking away from the TV is not the same as stripping out ads from the video content.

The issue isn't whether you care, because adblock users obviously don't care how the person giving them content gets paid... it's just not their problem... they just don't care. The issue is what's fair. It's fair you make money for the content creators by intentionally/accidentally watching ads in exchange for viewing their content for free.

Sorry, but if you wish to access content on a commercial website, you must at least download their ads so they get paid. If you don't agree to that, you should simply not visit the website.

Tell me how creators are getting screwed out of their rightful income after they've already kicked the bucket?

The same way the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of real estate owners would get screwed if their million dollar properties were seized by the government and made public domain after about 100 years of ownership by the first owner.

I wouldn't want to pay indefinite royalties to the construction company/architect for a cookie cutter house design. Would you ?

Maybe okay to charge for something spectacular like the the leaning tower of Pisa etc. There's no way you can get recurring royalties for something as ordinary as a minor tweak of existing house designs. That's like an employee wanting a cut of company profits for implementing bubblesort in the company's moneymaker software.

Why not? Artificial/arbitrary copyright duration was created to screw the little guys (artists). What rational argument is there that makes it right to strip ownership from the copyright holder after a few decades? Does real estate become public domain after 100 years of ownership?

If computers and the internet had not been invented, you would need to purchase vinyl or tape to listen to the music giving infinite duration profits to record publishers and only 50 or so years to copyright holders (typically creators). And that's just bullshit.

It's my damned screen, and my damned internet connection.

To rule that I have some legal obligation to load and view your ads would be idiotic.

False argument... That's like saying it's your cable box and your TV and you have every right to control what's on the screen, including stripping ads automatically (without changing channels or muting)

Also, you paid for your computer, and also for your internet connection and you think that's okay. But somehow it's not okay for the vendor providing you web content to charge you money (indirectly through ads)? Are website owners creating websites for charity? Do you belong to the entitlement generation?

It's also a lot cheaper than drones (once the high cost of building the tunnels has been paid). Rail like systems are way more fuel efficient than drones which consume energy proportional to their weight and the weight of their payloads just to stay above ground. That's not feasible in a modern world where there is a constant shortage of energy.

How is scientology any less of a religion than christianity or islam or mormons or any other belief system?

Simple, there are no profound supernatural events or beings involved in the creation of scientology, whereas other religions are based on (real or alleged) supernatural beings/events.

Perhaps but Starcraft is older than COD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...